U s intelligence

President Trump again expressed confidence in U.S. intelligence agencies and their assessment of Russian interference on Wednesday, but declined to say whether he believes Vladimir Putin was lying when he denied Russia was behind the meddling effort. Mr. Trump made the comments in an interview with "CBS Evening News" anchor Jeff Glor at the White House. Mr. Trump said he believes it's "true" Russia meddled in the 2016 election and said he directly warned Putin against interfering in U.S. elections during their one-on-one meeting in Helsinki, Finland, on Monday. Asked what he said to Putin, Mr. Trump responded, "Very strong on the fact that we can't have meddling, we can't have any of that ... I let him know that we can't have this, we're not going to have it, and that's the way it's going to be." Mr. Trump also expressed confidence in Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, whose dire warnings about U.S. hacking vulnerabilities he had questioned in a previous interview. … [Read more...] about Trump says he believes U.S. intelligence on Russian meddling, but declines to say Putin lied

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the Russian government is no longer trying to meddle in U.S. elections, contradicting his director of national intelligence, who has said that Kremlin-ordered attacks are ongoing. In response to a shouted question from a reporter as to whether Russia was still targeting the U.S., Trump shook his head and said “no.” He quickly followed with a brief monologue arguing that his administration has been tougher on Russia than any of its predecessors and that “President Putin knows that better than anybody, certainly better than the media.”Story Continued Below At her Wednesday press briefing, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied that the president had said Russia is no longer attacking the U.S. but that he instead had been saying "no" to taking additional questions from reporters. She said the White House believes the threat of Russian election interference remains. "The president said thank you very much … [Read more...] about Trump newly undercuts top U.S. intelligence chief on Russia

HELSINKI -- After meeting one-on-one with Russian President Vladimir Putin for more than two hours -- a first for an American president -- President Trump seemed to side with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies on Russian interference in the 2016 election. "I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today," the president said. After the election, all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government directed cyberattacks on members of the Democratic Party. That view is also shared by bipartisan committees in the House and Senate and the president's own director of national intelligence, Dan Coats. "All I can do is ask the question. My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me, and some others, they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin, he just said it's not Russia. I will say this, I don't see any reason why it would be," the president said. That … [Read more...] about Trump sides with Putin over U.S. intelligence during remarkable press conference in Helsinki

By Seung Lee | [email protected] | Bay Area News Group PUBLISHED: February 14, 2018 at 10:05 am | UPDATED: February 14, 2018 at 3:03 pm If you are shopping for a new smartphone, stay away from Huawei phones, warn U.S. national security agency chiefs. Six top U.S. intelligence chiefs told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday that they would not recommend phones made by China-based Huawei as they may pose a cybersecurity risk for private U.S. citizens. The chiefs — including the heads of CIA, FBI, NSA and the director of national intelligence — extended their concerns to the telecom company ZTE for the same reason. “We’re deeply concerned about the risks of allowing any company or entity that is beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks,” said FBI Director Chris Wray, according to CNBC. U.S. government officials have long been wary of … [Read more...] about U.S. intelligence agency chiefs warn against using Huawei phones

In-Q-Tel, an investment firm that connects tech companies with the U.S. Intelligence community, has taken an undisclosed stake in SigOpt, a San Francisco-based AI startup. The move will provide the startup with additional capital and help it reach an audience of secretive AI practitioners at spy agencies. As part of the deal, In-Q-Tel will sell SigOpt’s technology to U.S. intelligence agencies. SigOpt’s software lets customers automatically optimize the hyperparameters in a machine learning system — certain variables in the algorithm that help control how well the resulting model performs. Ordinarily, optimizing hyperparameters requires manual tweaking by experts who are doing so through a mix of intuition and guesswork. SigOpt’s software replaces that process with a system that observes how a model performs and uses that insight to suggest new hyperparameters that should improve its results. Offloading that task to the software will let data scientists focus … [Read more...] about In-Q-Tel invests in SigOpt to help U.S. intelligence agencies optimize AI